Interior of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF), located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California. The NIF target chamber uses a high-energy laser to heat fusion fuel to temperatures sufficient for thermonuclear ignition. The facility is used for basic science, fusion energy research, and nuclear weapons testing.

U.S. Department of Energy

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lasers

…the 1960s physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California calculated that intense laser pulses could produce those conditions by heating and compressing tiny pellets containing mixtures of hydrogen isotopes. They suggested using these “microimplosions” both to generate energy for civilian use and to simulate the implosion of a…

Livermore

…Livermore Laboratory in 1971 and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1979) by the University of California spurred the city’s growth as a technological centre (atomic ordnance, nuclear research, medicine, and computer-related manufacturing). Livermore’s population grew rapidly in the 1990s, when residents of the San Francisco Bay area moved farther from…

nuclear fusion reactors

For example, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a product of density and energy-confinement time of 5 × 1014 seconds per cubic centimetre has been achieved employing the world’s largest and most powerful laser, the Nova laser. (The Nova is a 10-beam neodymium-glass laser operated at an…

Teller

…second nuclear weapons laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, Calif., in 1952. For almost the next four decades it was the United States’ chief factory for making thermonuclear weapons. Teller was associate director of Livermore from 1954 to 1958 and from 1960 to 1975, and he was its…